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What Kills Me by Wynne Channing
Genre: YA Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Self-published
What Kills Me is available as an ebook from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. More reviews available on Goodreads.
The fight for survival begins.
An ancient prophecy warns of a girl destined to cause the extinction of the vampire race.
So when 17-year-old Axelia falls into a sacred well filled with blood and emerges a vampire, the immortal empire believes she is this legendary destroyer. Hunted by soldiers and mercenaries, Axelia and her reluctant ally, the vampire bladesmith Lucas, must battle to survive.
How will she convince the empire that she is just an innocent teenager-turned bloodsucker and not a creature of destruction? And if she cannot, can a vampire who is afraid of bugs summon the courage to fight a nation of immortals?
Overview: I think that I would of liked this book better if I hadn’t read so many in the genre. I never got the feeling that this story and the characters were special. The danger felt contrived and the characters safe in a formulated story. I can understand why people love this book, but I don’t think it was unique enough for my liking. It did have some humorous scenes and one-liners that were nothing short of awesome. The excerpt is one of my favorites.
Characters: Lucas felt short for me. He was too rough and bitter in the beginning and his transformation by the end was too abrupt to be believable. I liked Axelia for the majority of the story, although her part in the very beginning was nothing short of stupidity. There’s no way that a “good” girl would decide to meet a stranger in the dark, after curfew, when everyone warns her not to…just not believable either. Besides that, I did like her. She acted like a dumb blonde sometimes, but the way Lucas played off of that trait was so darn funny that I liked it.
Plot: Girl meets boy. Girl dies and becomes vampire. Girl has lots of people that want to kill her because she’s the chosen one. If this was the first vampire novel I have ever read, I would have loved the plot. I LOVE reading vampire books (and have read way too many) and so I the plot in this book kept reminding me of what I’ve read in other books. It wasn’t predictable, however, and I wasn’t quite sure how Axelia and Lucas would escape the people wanting to kill them until it happened.
Ending: The VERY end felt cheesy to me. It wasn’t what I expected, but really disappointed me.
(I received a copy of this novel from the author (LibraryThing) in exchange for an honest review.)
This is a great novel for those who haven’t read many paranormal or vampire novels.
“What about guns with silver bullets? Would that slow them down?”
“Silver bullets? We’re not werewolves.”
“Werewolves are real too?”
He glaced at me and then did a double take, seeing my bewildered face.
“Yes,” he said, watching my eyes widen. “They hang out with Santa and the Easter Bunny.”
I remained frozen for a moment and then pushed his arm.
“Hey, I’m driving,” he said. He turned away from me to check the left lane over his shoulder but not before I caught a subtle smile on his face. It was gone so quickly tha I wasn’t sure if I had seen it at all.
A few minutes passed. “So, they’re not real, right?”
(Picture and Information borrowed from Goodreads.)
Wynne Channing is an award-winning national newspaper reporter and young adult novelist.
She started writing horror/fantasy tales as a girl. She still has the first novel that she wrote when she was 10. It’s (unintentionally) hilarious.
Wynne loves telling stories and as a journalist, she has interviewed everyone from Daniel Radcliffe and Hugh Jackman to the president of the Maldives and Duchess Sarah Ferguson. The closest she has come to interviewing a vampire is sitting down with True Blood‘s Alexander Skarsgard (he didn’t bite).
She briefly considered calling her debut novel “Well” so then everyone would say: “Well written by Wynne Channing.”
Wordpress 